In years past, the formula was multitudes of obsequious staff and a heavy handed management style.

CNN: Paths to Top Service

In fact, capitalism entails neither robber barons nor kings nor obsequious serfs but independent beings who trade the products of their effort to mutual advantage.

FORBES: Steve Jobs and the Money-Making Personality

Greenberg should be put under the harsh spotlight of public scrutiny too, instead of being allowed to shoot his mouth off on CNBC or Bloomberg, where his inquisitors are invariably obsequious.

FORBES: The Croesus Chronicles

On the one hand, with its comforting array of British character actors and its kindly, not to say obsequious, approach to a royal triumph over circumstance, it touches the most conservative chords of period drama.

NEWYORKER: The King's Speech

He tried to help them in any way he could, offering to render the sorts of little services one might expect from a secretary or a valet rather than a colleague, for which he was reproached by a writer of his own generation, who called him obsequious and servile.

NEWYORKER: ?lvaro Rousselot��s Journey